We were primarily focused on solidifying the design for the second reverb prototype, along with preparing for playtesting of both reverb prototypes. The second reverb prototype’s approach was focused on applying the “church” directly on the orb instead of creating a church environment around the player. The inspiration behind this approach came from the surveys we sent out to novice musicians and professionals, asking them what their preferences were in visualizing reverb in a VR space. Dropping a church on an orb and changing its opacity was a close second behind our first reverb prototype, so we thought it best to AB test these approaches to see which one works better in practice. The approach was designed as follows:
- After the church model snaps onto the orb, a wireframe church model wraps around the orb.
- Dry ratio: adjust the opacity of the orb by pressing Trigger on the left controller, ↑ the opacity by raising the left controller up, ↓ the opacity by lowering the left controller toward the floor.
- Wet ratio: adjust the opacity of the orb by pressing Trigger on the right controller, ↑ the opacity by raising the right controller up, ↓ the opacity by lowering the right controller toward the floor.
We also decided on additional documentation structure for our takeaways that will be focused on the individual prototypes. While this dev blog is a great structure to look at our journey throughout the semester, we decided that an additional piece of documentation focused more on the tech, design, and lessons learned from each individual prototype will be more beneficial as documentation for future audio VR projects who want to learn from our findings.
We will conduct in-person playtests with people from our core target audience (novice musicians) this week. Conducting them in a safe and meaningful manner are our priorities. Looking to next week, we will be focused on preparing for our halves presentation, and laying out what we want to prototype in the second half of the semester.